About one year ago, we have planned using barcode labels for our drawing archive system. Our discussion went from using separately printed stickers, to developing a special add-on application which would add barcodes to our released Inventor drawings and possibly integrate it with Vault. At the end we have found no easy to use way so we have postponed using it.

But only to yesterday when I was inspired by this nice barcode trick for AutoCAD and tried to make almost the same in Inventor. And it is so easy we can start using it immediately!

The method for Inventor 2008 is similar to the AutoCAD tip – only you have to use a text with the choosen drawing property. In the drawing environment use the text tool and from the drawing properties (type) select e.g. the “PART NUMBER” property. Of course select the right barcode font for this text. And you are done – that’s all.

You can even put this to your drawing template and make sure that all your Inventor users have the Windows barcode font installed.

I have tested the Feature Recognition module already in Inventor 11. This add-on module allows to automatically recognize modelling features in imported dumb 3D solids. If you read in a STEP model, Feature Recognition tries to detect holes, fillets, extrudes and other geometric features. In an ideal case you will end up with an intelligent, feature-based 3D model.

The latest Feature Recognition module for Inventor 11 and 2008 can be downloaded from the Autodesk Labs site.